Happiest Kid Ever
by Mari83
Summary: What if... Sketchy is secretly an X5? Pre-series, no ship... and completely serious. Very late response to a prompt from DA Halloween at LJ.


_**Disclaimer**_: Don't own Dark Angel

_**A/N: **_This is what my weird little brain comes up with after a prompt on LJ's DA_Halloween community, a scene in Aurora's S2 and a book mentioning from Shy.

Hugest thanks to _**Shy**_ for finding time in the middle of Christmas in July-July for geography research and the perfect-thorough betaing easing my error-phobia. All remaining mistakes are mine and will be happily collected if you find them.

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Calvin-Thor Moses Theodore had always known that his parents weren't really his parents.

He loved to hear the story how one late evening in May, the air unusually warm and balmy, they'd found him on their doorstep, a soundly sleeping baby in an old, battered college bag. Almost like Moses.

It had been his oldest step brother who'd opened the door to almost stumble over the bundle blocking the entrance. In cautious stupefaction they had taken the bag in, gathering around a well-fed infant of maybe six, seven months who had given them the loveliest smile one could imagine.

Known for a certain eccentricity, the Theodores spent the better part of a weekend searching for a name that would help the little one grow into an upright human being. Just like with their other kids though, it was soon affectionately shortened, Calvin-Thor becoming Sketchy after first covering walls and books and tables with senseless doodles.

Little Sketchy couldn't have cared less about being an adopted child, convinced that whomever had decided to drop him off at the Theodores' had made the most fortunate choice. Their three children, the youngest just having entered Junior High school, were delighted with the newcomer, dragging him along to the skate park, the mall and the library. And all of them were intrigued with this utterly good-natured baby who never cried, never complained, as if not wanting the world to take notice.

It was his unusually sharp eyes and the strangely black, almost square and fading birthmark on the back of his neck that became Sketchy's trademarks. With everything else he was so outstandingly mediocre that many parents might have despaired over their child so gloriously failing their expectations. The Theodores, however, had long adapted to reality and applauded his lanky soccer attempts just as much as his rare bouts of academic interest. With the unshakeable patience of having raised two boys and a stubborn daughter, they considered his affinity to mischief a lovable quality and only smiled mildly over his adventurous schemes to become rich and famous.

Even though he didn't know his roots and origin, something most people considered an essential part of their identity, little Sketchy had a happy childhood, one of utter, boring normalcy. Calvin Theodore didn't know his real parents, but that wasn't what set him apart from the playground crowd he tried to impress by eating that rain worm.

What he didn't know, couldn't have known, was that he did not really have parents. His life hadn't started with a love story, with the ancient romanticism of a sweet, handsome guy courting the girl next door, or even with the less romantic but just as ancient story of the same girl falling for the wrong guy, a short night turning into months of secrecy until the time had come to give up her child.

However, it would have been wrong to say that C. M. Theodore's life hadn't been planned. In fact it had been planned with the utmost care, lead by cool determination and a twisted fascination. Put together in sterile test tubes, Calvin's existence hadn't been begun with tender hopes of home and family or worried insomnia about unpaid bills, but by a science deeming itself above such ordinary emotions.

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The tricky thing about creating a chimera was finding the right mix of genes, a combination that would result in a super soldier instead of another degenerated creature. After the X4's catastrophic results, the X5s were started more conservatively, focusing on re-arranging human DNA while carefully increasing the animal part.

However, the first results where disappointing, the babies either dying in the first weeks or developing with such disappointing mediocrity that the Committee started to question their approach.

The baby later on known as Sketchy Theodore was of the latter kind. Smiling at everything with an undiscriminating kindness disturbingly wrong for a future soldier, he was early on suspected to be another failure. At the age of three months his developmental scores were just below average, and as he continued to grow in frustrating normalcy he neither displayed any premature verbal abilities nor outstanding motor skills.

And so, when another three months passed without any change for the better, not even a trace of superiority distinguishing infant X5-7, he was chosen for elimination.

Elimination, disposal, euthanasia. Those were the words they used, cool, clinical descriptions for the lumps of cells they had once watched under the microscope. They were the words used by the young doctor ordered to perform the termination before his boss left to watch his son's soccer game. This young doctor turned out to be the luck of X5-7.

Like most he'd been hired with the promise of a sky-high salary and the opportunity for ground-breaking research. Freshly graduated and eager to prove himself, he hadn't wanted to know what he had gotten himself into and by the time he realized what it all meant it was too late.

Unlike many others, though, he never completely eased into Manticore's mindset. Sometimes when he worked, he felt as if he watched someone else, as if it weren't his hands performing tests and experiments. And yet, aiming to please he'd assisted in surgeries reminiscent of horror movies, and became tangled into perversions that were unmentionable even though all he wanted was to talk and get rid of the memories.

But this was too much. He couldn't do it. With the casual order to kill a sleeping child Manticore had reached the point where his revulsion tilted into resistance, where his disgust blinded him to the consequences.

Thinking back to that day later on, he couldn't have explained what happened. His actions weren't planned or thought through; if anything, it was as if his instinctive will to survive had simply extended to the little boy.

As if in a in trance he reached into the crib, his hand with the syringe trembling even though now merely meant to sedate. Numbly calm, he watched how the little body relaxed into sleep, thinking how similar the scene would have looked if the injection had been lethal.

After that it was almost too easy to forge an autopsy report and send a lab monkey's body to the crematory while the baby was alive and silent in that old college gym bag he still kept as a witness to his stellar swimming career.

He passed the guards without a problem and steered his car through the impenetrable forest encasing Manticore, driving east where he knew nobody and nobody knew him.

On autopilot he made it somewhere into South Dakota before the panic overwhelmed him. The realization of what he'd done urged him to leave the open highway, stopping the car at the outskirts of some utterly normal neighbourhood. He felt sick. Both hands holding onto the wheel, he felt as if someone had twisted his guts, his heart protesting with hard, pounding beats that left no room for the calming breathes he forced himself to take.

The baby was still sleeping. Peaceful and steady, his breath barely moved his rosy cheeks and yet looked so different from the stillness which the young doctor almost would have inflicted. Now, away from Manticore's labs, the idea of forming those helpless beings into fighters seemed like a surreal absurdity. Out here, surrounded by the repetitive mirror image of white picket fences, he just looked like any father taking a ride to lull his little one into sleep…

… a young father with a Wyoming number plate and a baby that had been packed into a bag like a dog, stumbling to explain where he came from and where he was going. If anybody saw them now…

With the though,t his head jerked around abruptly, nervous green eyes checking the unmoving scenery. There was nobody around, the suburban streets quiet and deserted in the late evening gloom. And still, what if somebody saw them? What would they think, what would they remember?

Suddenly feeling like an intruder in this motionless idyllic setting, his highly praised brain finally kicked in, analyzing the situation. What had he been the thinking, a young guy showing up with a baby, without a mother or a clue how to care for something so small? That alone would attract more attention than he could afford, would create gossip growing and spreading until it reached a searching ear…

Of course Manticore would find out what he'd done: if not tomorrow, then in some days and then they'd simply hunt him down. And he'd made it so easy for them, the idiocy of taking his own car rendering him a sitting duck.

Now that he viewed his actions from a logical point of view, his own stupidity terrified him.

How could he have been so foolish to disappear with the baby, the connection between the missing doctor and the missing X-5 so striking that he just as well could have waited for Manticore in his own living room?

He'd saved the boy's life by endangering his own, but in reality both of them wouldn't survive long enough to draw any kind of satisfaction from his impulsive altruism. He would be hunted and in hiding, trying to care for a baby without knowing whether they'd still be alive the next day. Never again there would be safety or comfort, neither for him nor the boy.

He couldn't do it.

Again it wasn't a conscious decision steering him as he climbed out of the car, the bag with the baby in one hand. Scanning the small, identical houses stretching out in neat lines, his gait was that of someone searching without a goal.

The thing that caught his gaze and kept it from wandering over yet another perfect lawn was a slide, one of those brightly colorful plastic ones that kindled the excitement of pre-schoolers and drew only bored disdain from older kids. Seemingly forgotten, it stood half-edged into the holly brushes of a garden cluttered with bikes and skateboards, deck chairs, gnomes and gardening tools.

That alone might not have been enough to halt his erratic quest. But there were voices and laughter, spilling out of the half-open windows while five, six cars waited outside in the driveway to carry their owners home. His subconscious didn't need more to form a plan, knowing that a dinner gathering meant that people would be leaving soon. Merry and still filled with good food and laughter, they would step into the night, taking in everything, even an abandoned baby, with welcoming generosity. This was the right place for a child to be raised.

Again trusting this somnambulistic instinct, he sneaked through the dim garden, evading all the accessories of a happy childhood. A few feet before the door he paused, making sure there was no movement on the other side. The dinner seemed to go on as before though and his looming fears were lulled with the knowledge that the people inside would find the baby and absorb him into their normal, ordinary lives.

He didn't look at the boy when he carefully put the bag onto the concrete steps, just as they'd never looked at the children's faces during their experiments. Nor did he indulge in the stereotypical last gaze back, knowing that this was the best solution. He just turned around and walked to the car, dreadfully relieved over the empty passenger seat.

Then he drove back west, drove all night to just barely make it to Manticore the next morning, its gates opening for him of as if nothing had happened.

xxx The End xxx

(Obviously the prompt was 'Sketchy is secretly an X5' and quite probably not meant this way)


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